[sakaeyellow]

I was brought up in a pure Kanji environment-Hong Kong. No pinyin whatsoever. Just Kanji. And I can tell you that when kids here learn Kanji, 9 out of ten words are Kanji phrases they have never heard of before. I can guarantee that learning Kanji without first learning how to pronounce or use them is perfectly okay. There are tens of millions of successful examples here and there.

The advantage of Kanji is that you can guess the meaning even if you haven't encountered the word before. And there are words that can't be learned properly without Kanji. Examples are : 農夫vs農婦 買vs売

I agree that spending 1/2 to 1 year on learning Kanji alone, i.e. the Remembering the Kanji way, is a complete waste of time. But I think learners should learn the Kanji that appears in the textbook one by one.